Who I am and some of what I've done in my life

30) Human Dynamics

Don’t Speak of Cold Misty Mountains. Looking at the rules of grammar that native speakers apply without consciously knowing them. Beginning with Tolkien, but extending to other languages, including Chinese.

‘The Individual’ is a muddled idea. From one viewpoint, the ‘average individual’ is a bronze-skinned hermaphrodite less than 5 feet tall. That comes from taking your abstractions a few degrees too far.

The Disagreement Between ‘Everyone’ and ‘Anyone’. These are rival simplifications of human nature. People actually get torn between their individual wishes and the demands of various groups they belong to. And various principles they see as valid.

Genius and Other Mental Abnormalities. Behind every Great Man there’s a Great Ape. The odd way in which we became human, and the ancestral features we still retain. Creativity is closely tied to things we class as maladjustment or madness.

Is Giftedness Tied to Cultural Values? What’s mistaken and what’s useful in Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment (a geographic / historic survey of famous names, mostly dead white males.) How he fails to mention evidence that most US creativity comes from recent arrivals, while being fully assimilated appears to depress creativity.